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Further Reading

Microsoft talked briefly about the new features in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but it glossed over one thing that will surely be of great interest to sysadmins and developers alike: the further refinement of the Windows command line into a truly useful development and administration environment. Fortunately, engineer and blogger Rafael Rivera has spent some hands-on time with a technical preview, and he’s got a great post up explaining some of the new features—at least, as they stand right now.

Enlarge/ The new Windows 10 command prompt options, from the current technical preview.

Rivera has a whole raft of additional screenshots demonstrating the additional command line features, but one of the simplest—and most anticipated—is proper text selection within command prompt windows. And we’re not just talking about Powershell, either—this is for every console window, including windows featuring good ol’ cmd.exe.

Previously, as anyone who’s dealt with a Windows command shell knows, selecting text at the prompt required a number of steps beyond simply clicking and dragging. You had to invoke a context menu, select "Mark" to tell Windows you wanted to mark text to select, and then lasso a selection box around what you wanted to pick. Text that spanned multiple lines was treated as not a single string, but rather multiple lines of text, with extraneous spacing and line breaks intact. This made for an annoying process—for more than basic selection, it was often easier to redirect whatever you were doing into a text file and do selection with a text editor.

Windows 10’s prompt addresses this, finally supporting native selection and line wraps. Accompanying this change is the ability to quickly paste text into the command prompt without needing to use context menus or the menubar—good old ctrl-v will now drop the clipboard’s contents onto the command line, rather than inserting a ^V character. There are additional control key shortcuts too, finally bringing standard copy, paste, and find functionality to the long-neglected shell.

Also huge is the command window’s new ability to re-flow text as the window is resized, rather than simply growing a horizontal scrollbar. As with the other features listed above, this is something that other operating systems have had in their text shells for ages, and it will be a wonderfully welcome feature when it arrives.

Ars Microsoft Superstar Peter Bright will be spending much more time with Windows 10 as it nears release, and you can bet that the command line will be an area where he focuses particular attention. Stay tuned!

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com